As a schoolboy, we have noted, Hegel exhibited personality traits that his biographers have characterized as excessively scholarly. Indeed, when he was in his teens Hegel's personality was often likened to that of an “old man” from the perspective of his peers, his academic work habits and aspirations were already those of a mature scholar. And yet, like his Stuttgart neighbor Moser, who was also called the “old man,” Hegel was regarded as more of a “Collecteenmacher” than a “thinker,” the difference between the two being that while the collector excerpted from the texts of others the thinker created and worked with his own ideas. Hence, the scholarly fuss we noted earlier about Hegel's originality as a schoolboy vis-à-vis his more precocious classmates Schelling and Hölderlin.

If the nickname “old man” hints at a Moser–Hegel personality parallel, Hegel's writings in the 1790s suggest a convergence of their religious and political interests as well. As was noted in the last chapter, Moser's religiopolitical views found new spokesmen among, and a receptive audience within, the Württemberg reform group of the 1790s. During these years, when Moser's views were back in vogue, Hegel was writing essays that set forth a reformist political position. On the one hand, Hegel called, as Moser had, for greater participation on the part of “the people of Württemberg” in the political processes that governed their lives. Through the exercise of collective will, Hegel argued, Württembergers would be “able to rise above” their “petty interests” and, by so doing, reveal both their “character” as a “people” and their commitment to the idea of the “general good.”